Dog Days

This dog probably owned Spook's girlfriend Linda down in Las Cruces. On my first visit to New Mexico, in March of '77, we rendezvoused there. A gang of us were headed for the Grand Prix in Long Beach, CA. I had enchiladas (from "Gil's") for the first time and learned to play to play cribbage while listening to Boston's "More Than A Feeling". Ah, the '70s!

The Billy the Kid Pageant

Every August, Lincoln hosts a Billy the Kid pageant, the highlights of which are the parade and performances of "The Last Escape of Billy the Kid". The play is corny and amateurish, but rings with integrity. It is actually performed by local folks in an outdoor setting mere yards from the very courthouse where the eponymous event occurred. The play has hilarious dialogue, horses and lots of gunplay. Matt, his wife Becky and probably half the populace of Lincoln have all appeared in it. For a period of years, I and my friends would turn up for Pageant and sell Billy the Kid t-shirts. Pictured is one of the designs. It is originally a linoleum print.

Adobe Shack

This sad little shack stood not too far from one of the several houses which Matt rented before building his own hacienda. The sketch is done in ink, marker and colored pencil. Abandoned buildings often intrigue me. I imagine the people who built them...the hopes and dreams which charged their existence...the joys and tragedies which unfolded within their walls...all of which are swept away by the march of time. Of course, this adobe was probably just a utility shed where none of that happened!

"Typical Lincoln"

To a large extent, the town of Lincoln, NM is a museum celebrating the Old West in general and the Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid in particular. Many of the oldest buildings are historical sites and any new construction has to be done in an official "frontier style". Pictured above is a "typical Lincoln" adobe house. "Typical Lincoln" was one of Matt's pet phrases by which he referred to the petty small-town bickering of his adopted hometown.

My buddy Matt

Speaking of my buddy Matt, this is a portrait of him, drawn from life sometime in the mid-70's. He was a boon companion, a generous and warm-hearted soul. He carved out a successful career as a landscrape architorturer in the hostile environs of the southwest. He was a beloved husband and father, utterly devoted to his "girls" and he is sorely missed by all that had the pleasure to know him.

White Elephant

Being an Air Force brat, Matt and his family had lived all around the world, hence his frat nickname "Nomad". Despite this lifestyle, he had still managed to accumulate a quantity of oddities, like this porcelain elephant from the mysterious kingdom of Siam.

View from the valley of the Rio Bonito

Here is a pencil sketch of a vista which I have depicted in oils and marker: the north side of the valley of the Rio Bonito, setting of Lincoln, New Mexico. These are the only mountains I have ever climbed...I've scaled the north side with my wife and the south side with Matt, Spook, Carol and Burnsie. It took us probably a couple of hours and we used no equipment and met no disaster, so they are pretty easy mountains, I'm sure. The dark green mountains peeking behind are the Capitan Mountains. Supposedly, the Capitans are the only mountain range in North America which has an overall east-west orientation. The Capitans' most famous inhabitant was Smokey Bear, found as a cub in a tree there in 1950 in the wake of a fire. The north face of the Capitans is the site of the fabled Roswell UFO crash. My buddy Matt, a Lincoln inhabitant, was a firm believer in the authenticity of that event. This may be because his friend Glen was the undertaker called in by the Air Force to provide child-sized coffins for the alien corpses.

12 string headstock

Unfortunately, the flash of the camera is too intense. However, the headstock has been modified with several pieces. First I glued on some mahogany veneer. The guitar tuners weren't quite right for the thickness of the headstock, so I ran two strips of bocote to make up the difference. The stalk of thistle, the leaves and lower part of of the flower are carved from poplar and the bristle is carved from purpleheart. I was quite surprised that when I finished the rehabilitation of this instrument, it sounded quite good...far better than my modest skills warrant.

Fingerboard, headstock, case

I used the smallest guitar tuners I could find, but there are 12 of 'em and they do throw off the balance of the instrument, the body being so light. The case is maybe overkill...it is plywood all around. A cavity for the gourd-back was formed with the spray-foam "Great Stuff" and at Joann's Fabrics I found a liner that is somewhat thistle-like. The instrument is flanked by two compartments which store strings and original unused parts.

Thistle pickguards

I decided to employ the thistle, a symbol of Scotland, as the motif on the 12-string. After some failed attempts with other materials, I settled on thinly cut lyptus to represent the leaves of the plant. I tinted a water-based stain with food coloring to make them green, glued the pickguards to the soundboard and lacquered the body.

12 string mandolin #1

About 30 years ago, Mr Kopriva gave me the remnant of a 12-string mandolin, consisting of the
shell back, neck (no fingerboard) and headstock. One set of 6 tuners and the bridge and saddle were included. There was no soundboard and the nut was missing, too. I started working on it at Bob Gorney's ( a Chicago luthier ) shop. With his assistance, I put on the fingerboard and cut the fret slots, as well as glued on a soundboard. Then, I got distracted by life and forgot about it for 25 years...

Clueless Rose Trio

Speaking of mandolin players, here is the official group portrait for The Clueless Rose Trio...that's 4-String Paul on bass, Irish Mike on guitar and me, Deaf Jeff, on mandolin. We make quite a noise.

Hops & Barley's

I've been massacring the mandolin for too many years, but I've seldom met another player. Whereas, guitar players are a dime
a dozen. This is perfectly reasonable because the guitar is a more versatile instrument and better suited as accompaniment when singing. Still, I think every guitar player ought to learn a second instrument. So when Mr Doman said his pal Dan, the mandolin player for "Cabin 5" would be playing at Hops & Barley's, I was delighted to catch their performance.

Hops & Barley's

Croquet hankering...

Boy, it doesn't take much more than a thaw to get me thinking about a visit to the Chicago Croquet Club greens, which are actually brown this time of year and sprinkled with goose turds. But, I may have to get out there soon to claim February braggin' rights!

OD fellows #4

As far as I know, not too many copies of this game were ever sold, but that is not very surprising. Avalon Hill was more of a hard-core specialty war game publisher. They did little, if any, mainstream advertising. Their customer base typically had little interest in a game of this sort. I believe we got one royalty check for about $400 and another for $50ish. Oh, well, it is a fun game though!

OD fellows #3

For my sources, I appropriated imagery from the archives of each broad racial group depicted. I suppose some today would object to this on several levels, but it boots not. Oh-so-cleverly the numbers of sides on each symbol increase...the circle having one (or two if you count both inside and outside), the crescent having two (or four...), &c, &c. Naturally, being playing cards, the images need to be mirrored and it was fun working that out. A little more difficult, and certainly less successful, was the lettering (not depicted in these images) for each "court card". The object was calligraphy which read the same whether upside or downside for the words: LORD, QUEEN, PRIESTESS, WARRIOR, ASSASSIN, THIEF.

OD fellows #2

OD was published in 1985. Avalon Hill trademarked it as their "metaphysical card game" and "elemental force card game"..."A unique blend of skill and chance." What is an od? "An od is an element of theoretical force. By bringing the ods into balance, one may reach perfection in the metaphysical world. All of life is seeking after such balance. So too is this game." I'm not exactly sure what that means. Yes, a well-balanced life sounds like a good thing, until one starts nit-picking about what exactly is being balanced. At any rate, OD is a good game, though it would have been better if published with the original components. In what were probably cost cutting moves, two standard 6-sided dice were substituted for the original 6, 8, 10 and 12 sided dice and the number of thief cards was cut down from the initial 20 to a measly 6. The cards themselves are heavy stock but definitely not standard durable playing card stock and they are much worse for wear over the years.

OD fellows #1

Way back when, my buddy Dave devised a card game...it was based on the number of cards in a Tarot deck and involved the use of polyhedral dice. He asked me to make illustrations for the face cards. Somehow, he managed to persuade the Avalon Hill Game Company of Baltimore, Maryland to publish the game, which is called OD. We were quite thrilled, since some of our favorite war games were published by Avalon Hill.

Blue Winter

It cannot be denied that winter is a-getting us down. But, it is a small price to pay to keep the insects at bay!